January 10, 2018

Government agencies can become complacent and sloppy. Sometimes the complacency and sloppiness leads to corruption or worse, someone gets hurt or killed. Though the agency heads may change from time to time as political administrations change, the agency head’s immediate subordinates often remain. Often those immediate subordinates have titles such as Deputy this or Associate that. Complacency, sloppiness, corruption, and criminal conduct occur further down among agency employees because it is being tolerated and sometimes directed by the inhabitants of an agency’s Mahogany Row. Institutional complacency and sloppiness oozes down from the top.

In spite of my using an image of the front page headline from the September 28, 1964, New York Times, this OpenCdA post is not about revamping the US Secret Service. The photo referring to President Kennedy’s murder and the resulting Warren Commission was used to emphasize the importance of federal agencies’ operations being subjected to regular critical Congressional oversight and then making appropriate corrections before official rebuke becomes necessary.

The Warren Commission examination of the US Secret Service after President Kennedy’s murder was necessary. The changes the Commission made were long overdue and were far more expansive than the public, unclassified version of the Warren Commission Report reflected.

Having watched carefully the pre- and now post-2016 election circus back in Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac, I believe top-down, Warren Commission-like examinations of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) are also critically necessary and need to begin soon. There appears to have been DoJ and FBI malfeasance, criminal conduct, and the abuses of investigative authority including misleading and possibly outright lying to the FISA Court to obtain FISA Court warrants to surveil persons associated with the Trump Campaign and possibly candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump himself.

Sensitive information selectively leaked from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and public information found in recent Congressional hearings strongly suggest that before and after November 8, 2016, some headquarters executive and supervisory level officials of both the FBI and DoJ apparently looked into the funhouse mirrors adorning their Mahogany Row office walls. Apparently they saw a messianic face looking back at them. Perhaps believing the image they saw in their mirrors to be above the laws of the United States, they may have concluded they had been divinely anointed to undo President Donald J. Trump’s election, in their minds an unthinkable wrong committed by “deplorable” voters on November 8, 2016.

If the DoJ and FBI abused intelligence assets and statutory authority, the abuses represent a grave threat to the national security. They completely undermine the trust and confidence the citizens of the United States must have in these agencies. (more…)

December 14, 2017

It’s one thing for the anti-Trumpers in the FBI and DoJ to allegedly criminally conspire to overthrow the duly-elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

That’s bad enough, but now it’s being reported that Nellie Ohr, wife of DoJ official Bruce Ohr who met with Trump Dossier author Christopher Steele, is an amateur radio operator. Her Technician Class license was granted by the Federal Communications Commission on May 23, 2016. The radio talk show/internet/skews media rumor mill suggests she and a co-conspirator may have been communicating via ham radio in hopes of avoiding interception by the NSA. (The flaw in that reasoning is obvious to anyone with a ham ticket.)

Now ol’ Nellie KM4UDZ has really stirred up the hornet’s nest. If she thinks being pursued by the entire intelligence community plus the US Congress is irritating, just wait until she feels the wrath of the FCC. Boy, is she ever in trouble now! Why, they may even revoke her ham radio license!

And being a ham radio operator myself, I’m mad, too. I just may go stick a pin through her antenna feedline. That’ll show her!

Neither is it illegal for employees of the federal government, including employees of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to express their personal views about the competence and qualifications of public officials.

However, a federal employee’s expression of personal views goes beyond what is permitted or prohibited by the Hatch Act when that employee uses his or her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.

Hatch Act violations are serious. However, they are not as serious as interfering in federal criminal investigations involving the alleged violation of national security laws including:

2 U.S.C. § 192 (Contempt of Congress Related to National Security)

18 U.S.C. § 219 et seq. (Officers and Employees of the United States Acting as Foreign Agents)

These laws are not supposed to be waived simply because an alleged violator is a former President, a former Secretary of State and a now-former presidential candidate, or a high-level employee of the DoJ or FBI.

Similarly, it seems to OpenCdA writing from Upper Trashcanistan, Idaho, that for federal employees to conspire (notice we didn’t say “collude”) to interfere with or prevent the initiation of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of any of these laws might qualify as separate violations under 18 U.S.C. § 371 (Conspiracy) and 18 U.S.C. § 1510 (Obstruction of Criminal Investigations). (more…)

Readers may recall that during the summer of 2017, there was a series of protest events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Generally, these events involved demonstrations both supporting and opposing the City’s decision to remove the statutes of two Civil War confederate generals, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, from public display.

The protest events in July and August often involved concurrent and opposing demonstrations that required local government planning and law enforcement interevention.

In particular, the demonstration on August 12 received persistent coverage from the national skews media. It was in that demonstration that a demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was struck and killed by a car driven by an opposing demonstrator, James Fields. Her death and President Trump’s appropriately neutral comments about the demonstrators became the focus of the skews media coverage. The Final Report explains how failures to plan, execute, and communicate by state and local government and law enforcement contributed to her death.

There are many lessons to be learned from the 220-page report. OpenCdA hopes that Idaho state, county, and local government, medical, and public safety agencies will heed them.

December 2, 2017

Preceding OpenCdA posts have opined that President Trump’s swamp draining should start in the Mahogany Row floors of both the Robert F. KennedyDepartment of Justice Building and the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building.

OpenCdA is concerned about the “politically charged texts disparaging President Trump and supporting Hillary Clinton” Strzok exchanged with another member of Mueller’s team. However, we are equally concerned about Strzok’s extramarital affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

This was the most laughable paragraph in the skews article:

Defenders of Strzok and Page inside the FBI said that because there was no direct supervisory role between Page and Strzok in the workplace, there wasn’t anything professionally wrong about having an affair, but they added that they understood why Mueller would not want anyone engaged in such conduct on his team. For one thing, if a foreign intelligence agency learned of such an affair, they could try to use it as a means of blackmail, although there’s no evidence anyone outside the FBI was aware of the relationship.

As any intelligence service case officer knows and Strzok should have known, an “extramarital affair” can fit both the “C” and the “E” in M.I.C.E. If Strzok and his “defenders” don’t believe the Russian SVR might have had an inkling, they should be forced to sit through every counterespionage public service video the Feebs have ever produced. And we certainly don’t agree that “there wasn’t anything professionally wrong” with it.

Strzok was one of the high-level Feebs running the Feeble’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one who wonders “What Happened.”

November 21, 2017

OpenCdA readers may remember former FBI Director James Comey’s public statement on July 5, 2016, regarding Hillary Clinton’s criminal culpability for using her illegal and unsecured private email server to handle and unlawfully disclose national security information.

In that statement, Comey said, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.” [emphasis OpenCdA’s]

Why did former FBI Director James Comey say, “… our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case [prosecute Hillary Clinton for jeopardizing national security with her private email server]”?

Listening to Comey when he made the statement, we immediately picked up on the exact phrases we’ve highlighted. OpenCdA’s thought upon hearing Comey’s statement was that the FBI may have been running an offensive counterintelligence operation (OFCO) against the Russians. We alluded to that in our July 14, 2016, OpenCdA post entitled It’s a ‘Bigot List’.

November 15, 2017

Many people are hoping that the US Department of Justice will appoint yet another special counsel, this time to look into the various crimes allegedly committed or criminally aided and abetted by former President Bill Clinton, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, unnamed co-conspirators associated with the Clinton Foundation, former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey, former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and former Democratic National Committee Chairwarmer Debbie Schultz.

Their hopes for that special counsel are pinned on President Trump’s promise to drain the swamp which is Washington, DC. The hopeful people are citing substantiated facts of far greater weight and veracity than the allegations Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein itemized in deciding to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into the skews media-ballyhooed ‘collusion’ between the Trump campaign and Russia.

If you’re among the people anticipating a special counsel with resulting indictments and convictions of one or more Clintonistas, don’t get your hopes up. Here’s why:

(1) The Clintons have acquired substantial dirt on some of the Fools on the Hill. The decades-old very thin allegations of sexual misconduct against senatorial candidate Roy Moore would pale in comparison to what some Fools on the Hill have reportedly engaged in much more recently. The Clintons and their cronies know who’s vulnerable. See M.I.C.E. The Clintons know where the corpses are buried, and most of The Swamp would prefer to do whatever it takes to keep them buried.

(2) In anticipation of a Hillary Clinton presidency, many Fools on the Hill and their obsequious propaganda arm, the national skews media (formerly known as the ‘free press’), hitched their teams of donkeys and elephants to the manure-bearing Clinton wagon. This particular gaggle of Fools would rather their constituents not connect them with the Clinton wagon smell, but another special counsel would certainly make just that connection. Keeping the odor of that connection from reaching the public nostril would fall on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and the AP.

(3) Some of the Clinton’s traitorous crimes involve compromises of national security. Anyone who thinks Slick Willy and Slimy Hillary would hesitate to use graymail to keep their own sorry asses out of court, not to mention federal prison, needs to be drug tested.

(4) It appears that in anticipation of a Slimy Hillary presidency, some of the mahogany row tenants at Main Justice seem to have skewed the concept of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutorial discretion allows cowardly prosecutors to decline to prosecute or choose to undercharge criminals for almost any reason at all as long as the reason is plausible and defensible or as long as it’s a certainty the alleged offender is going to be inaugurated as the President of the United States. Until the holdover loyalists to the Clintons and Obama are swept out of their mahogany row offices, there is little chance of prosecutions of anyone other than the lowest of the low-hanging fruit (think: Paul Manafort, Imran Awan, etc.).

(5) Closely related to the Main Justice Mahogany Row slimeballs are a few FBI Mahogany Row slimeballs. In the world of Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac politics, their job is to ensure that the results of otherwise competent, complete, and thorough investigations done by subordinate employees (e.g., brick agents) do not interfere with the political aspirations of certain elected and appointed officials.

(6) President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, occupied a US Senate seat for the twenty years immediately prior to his being sworn in as the 84th Attorney General of the United States on February 9, 2017. He is a distinguished alumnus of the Fools on the Hill Club.

OpenCdA is skeptical that a special counsel will be appointed, adequately funded, and given the necessary authority to investigate the offenses allegedly committed by the people identified in our opening paragraph.

We recall very vividly the pardon President Gerald Ford granted to former President Nixon on September 8, 1974, for Nixon’s complicity in Watergate. Ford’s reasoning for circumventing the criminal justice system was that subjecting Nixon to the criminal justice process would be too long and involved and would be too painful for the people of the country. In effect, Ford was telling us with condescension, You can’t handle seeing the former President of the United States subjected to the same standards of criminal justice to which you would be subjected.

Ford was wrong in 1974.

Maybe if Ford had done the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing in 1974, maybe if he had allowed Richard M. Nixon to be subjected to the prescribed processes and procedures of criminal justice that supposedly guarantees equal protection under the law for all citizens, then maybe in 2017 it wouldn’t have been necessary for AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to concoct some plausible justifications for not indicting and prosecuting former officials for espionage, bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering.

October 19, 2017

In a White House press briefing today, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly responded to comments made by Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson after she allegedly listened in on a personal telephone conversation from President Trump to the widow of Army SGT La David Johnson, a soldier killed recently in combat in Niger.

That planning and training saved hundreds more lives than the 59 which were lost on October 1, 2017, when Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino high-roller guest Stephen Paddock fired hundreds of rounds from his 32nd floor suite into a crowd of thousands attending the Route 91 Harvest Country Festival across Las Vegas Boulevard from the hotel.

So does the CBS 60 Minutes infotainment segment Storming Room 135. As Sheriff Lombardo explains in the segment, the on-scene assembly of two LVMPD dog handlers, a SWAT officer, and a detective was hardly haphazard as the word ‘storming’ implies. It was their planning and training that gave them the confidence and skills to quickly assemble and function as a coordinated first-in team.

OpenCdA is reasonably sure that when Sheriff Lombardo proposed his trip to Mumbai, India, in November 2008 to study the terrorist attack on hotels and other sites there that killed 164 people, some officials probably questioned the cost of that trip. What could the Sheriff possibly learn that would justify such an expenditure of funds? What is the real likelihood of a mass killing ever occurring in Clark County and Las Vegas?

Now they know. The money spent for thoughtful planning and training saved lives on October 1, 2017. Good leaders invest money on planning and preparing their employees. Politicians spend money on memorials.